Healthcare Compliance

As PreCheck’s Principal Consultant for Sanction Screening, I work with healthcare compliance officers every day to protect their facilities from excluded individuals and entities. With over ten years conducting sanction checks, I’ve seen dozens of scenarios and have helped clients identify physicians, employees and vendors who have been excluded from participating in federal health programs.

As we near the end of January, how prepared do you feel about the implementation of ICD-10 this fall? Although it may still be several months ahead, the October 1st deadline will be here before you know it, and now is the time to ensure that your organization has a plan in place. It may seem like an overwhelming task, but if you involve the right people, you’ll realize you have the resources to meet this deadline.  The following tips were taken from a presentation I attended at a regional HCCA conference titled, “ICD-10 for Non-Coders”, by Dr.

2013 was a very special year for PreCheck. We celebrated our 20th anniversary exclusively serving the healthcare industry and our Blog also had its first birthday last summer. As we look forward to another great year of new milestones, here’s a look back at ten of our most popular blog articles from last year.

In November 2013, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) revealed its Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2014-2018.  Earlier this year, the OIG issued a Special Advisory Bulletin (SAB) concerning exclusion screening and more recently issued a report recommending mandatory background screening of child care providers. But what can you expect in 2014 and beyond?

Last week, I traveled to Nashville, Tennessee along with a few of my colleagues for HealthStream Summit—an annual conference empowering healthcare professionals to achieve better outcomes in the delivery of patient care. Patient care and safety is what drives everything that we do at PreCheck, which is why we’ve partnered with a company like HealthStream that shares our core values for impacting healthcare.

On July 10, 2013, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) announced an upgrade to its Exclusions Search along with the July 2013 List of Excluded Individuals and Entities (LEIE) update. This isn’t the only recent change to this exclusion list. In June 2013, the OIG added new information to the list: the National Provider Identifier, a Waiver, and a Waiver State. With last month’s changes, the OIG released a redesigned exclusions search of the LEIE as well as the upgraded Online Exclusions Database and the LEIE Downloadable Databases. But what do these changes mean for you as an employer?

An effective license verification and management process can not only ensure patient safety for healthcare organizations, but it can also ensure compliance with accreditation standards and minimize the risk of overpayments. The following are five best practices for effective healthcare license verification and monitoring.

In May 2013, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a Special Advisory Bulletin concerning excluded individuals and entities. Within the advisory bulletin, the first in over a decade, the OIG alerted organizations receiving federal funding from Medicare that it is highly recommended that they monitor the OIG’s List of Excluded Individuals and Entities (LEIE) on a monthly basis in order to minimize their liability from civil monetary penalties.

On September 30, 1999 the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Department of Inspector General released a Special Advisory Bulletin on The Effect of Exclusion from Participation in Federal Health Care Programs. The brief document set off a deluge of questions and requests for clarification on critical policy guidelines in the fourteen years following its release.

The US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), Office of Inspector General (OIG) released a "Special Advisory Bulletin on the Effect of Exclusion from Participation in Federal Health Care Programs" on May 8, 2013—the first in over ten years. The OIG originally published a Special Advisory Bulletin in September 1999. What does this mean for your organization's sanction screening practices? The updated 2013 bulletin expands the OIG's exclusion authority.